Did
Vice President Dick Cheney help cover up the outing of covert CIA
operative Valerie Plame Wilson in the months after conservative columnist
Robert Novak first disclosed her identity?

That’s
one of the questions Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is likely
trying to figure out. It’s unclear what Cheney said to investigators back
in 2004 when he was questioned -- not under oath -- about the leak,
particularly what he knew and when he knew it.

The
five-count criminal indictment handed up by a grand jury last month
against Cheney’s former Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, sheds
new light on a pattern of strategic deception by the Vice President and
the White House to defuse an inquiry into who leaked the name of covert
CIA agent Valerie Plame Wilson to the press. Months after Plame’s identity
was disclosed by conservative columnist Robert Novak, Cheney continued to
hide the fact that he and his aides were intimately involved in
disseminating classified information about her to journalists.

What the Vice President denied knowing

The
indictment against Cheney’s Chief of Staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby,
clearly states that Cheney and Libby discussed Plame’s undercover CIA
status and the fact that her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson,
traveled to Niger to investigate claims that Iraq tried to acquire
yellowcake uranium from the African country in early June of 2003.

Yet
the following month, Cheney and then-White House Press Secretary Ari
Fleischer
asserted that the vice president was unaware of Wilson’s Niger trip,
who the ambassador was, or a classified report Wilson wrote about
his findings prior to the ambassador’s July 6, 2003 op-ed in the New
York Times.

We now
know, courtesy of the 22-page Libby indictment, that Cheney wasn’t being
truthful. Cheney did see the report; he knew full well who Wilson was. He
also knew that the CIA arranged for Wilson to travel to Niger, and he
personally sought out information about Wilson’s trip to Niger, was
briefed about the fact-finding mission, and even obtained classified
information about Plame’s covert CIA status. He also came to know one
other important nugget: that Plame may have recommended her husband for
the trip.

Cheney’s public campaign and that of other White House officials to
discredit Wilson and strategically lie about the Plame leak started on
Sept. 14, 2003, during an
interview with Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press.

During
the interview, Cheney maintained that he didn’t know Wilson or anything
about his trip.

“I
don’t know Joe Wilson,” Cheney said, in response to Russert who quoted
Wilson as saying there was no truth to the Niger uranium claims. “I’ve
never met Joe Wilson. And Joe Wilson -- I don’t know who sent Joe Wilson.
He never submitted a report that I ever saw when he came back... I don’t
know Mr. Wilson. I probably shouldn’t judge him. I have no idea who hired
him and it never came...”

“The
CIA did,” Russert said, interjecting.

“Who
at the CIA? I don’t know,” Cheney said. “He never submitted a report that
I ever saw when he came back.”

What
happened once Cheney received information on Plame and Wilson in June 2003
remains unclear. But the indictment illustrates -- in no uncertain terms
-- that the vice president’s office staged a concerted effort to undermine
Wilson for questioning the veracity of the Niger claims.

Fitzgerald has eyed Cheney in seeking to ascertain who ordered the leak,
as previously reported. While the Vice President stands accused of no
wrongdoing, his role may come into greater focus during a trial.

In an
interview with the syndicated radio program Democracy Now!,
Wilson argued that Cheney may have been lying to Russert when he said he
didn’t know about the ambassador’s Niger trip.

“While
we've never met, he certainly knows who I am and should know unless his
memory is flawed and faulty,” Wilson said during the Sept. 16, 2003
interview. “There were at a minimum three reports that had been generated
shortly after the Vice President had asked the question, ‘what do we know
about this?’”

The
vice president certainly must have known Wilson during his tenure as
secretary of defense during the first President Bush’s administration. In
the weeks leading up to the first Gulf War, Wilson served as the acting US
ambassador on the ground in Baghdad. In fact, Wilson was the only line of
communication between Washington and Saddam Hussein. The White House held
daily briefings with Wilson, and Cheney sat in on a majority of those
briefings.

White House Suggested Investigation Was Waste of Time

In
hindsight, it now seems that the White House, including President Bush,
attempted to steer reporters away from covering the Plame leak by saying
the “leaker” would never be found.

On
October 7, 2003, Bush and his spokesman, Scott McClellan, said that the
White House ruled out three administration officials -- Rove, Libby and
Elliot Abrams, a senior official on the National Security Council, as
sources of the leak -- a day before FBI questioned the three of them,
based on questions McClellan said he asked the men.

The
very next day, however, Rove was questioned by FBI investigators and said
that he spoke to journalists about Plame for the first time after Novak’s
column was published -- a lie, it appears -- based on Time reporter
Matthew Cooper’s e-mails which stated that Rove told Cooper about Plame.

Bush
told reporters the same day he doubted that a Justice Department
investigation would ever turn up the source of the leak, suggesting that
it was a waste of time for lawmakers to question the administration and
for reporters to follow up on the story.

“I
mean this is a town full of people who like to leak information,” Bush
said. “And I don't know if we're going to find out the senior
administration official. Now, this is a large administration, and there's
lots of senior officials. I don't have any idea.”

Senator Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ) responded to the president’s statement in
the New York Times: “If the president says, ‘I don't know if we're
going to find this person,’ what kind of a statement is that for the
president of the United States to make?” “Would he say that about a bank
robbery investigation?”

Facing
a deadline on turning over documents, e-mails and phone logs to Justice
Department officials, Bush said that the White House could invoke
executive privilege and withhold some “sensitive” documents related to the
leak case. Democrats speculated that the White House had something to
hide.

Classified Leak or Truthful Rebuttal?

Unable
to keep e-mails from investigators, the White House mounted a defense.
They would seek to distinguish between “unauthorized leaks” and something
perfectly legal: “setting the record straight.”

On
Oct. 6, 2003, in response to questions about whether Rove was Novak’s
source, McClellan tried to explain the difference between unauthorized
disclosure of classified information and “setting the record straight”
about Wilson’s public criticism of the Administration’s handling of
intelligence on Iraq.

“There
is a difference between setting the record straight and doing something to
punish someone for speaking out,” McClellan
said.

“There
were some statements made (by Wilson) and those statements were not based
on facts,” McClellan said. “And we pointed out that it was not the vice
president's office that sent Mr. Wilson to Niger.”

Wilson, it turned out, had never said that the vice president’s office had
sent him to Niger.

Jason Leopold is the author of the explosive memoir, News
Junkie, to be released in the spring of 2006 by Process/Feral House Books.
Visit Leopold's website at
www.jasonleopold.com
for updates. John Byrne and Larisa Alexandrovna of Raw Story
contributed to this story.